After decades, 'Whatever Works' still works, pretty much

Woody Allen wrote "Whatever Works" decades ago, near the height of his craft, intending Zero Mostel to star in it as Boris Yellnikoff, a grim, hate-filled New York intellectual drawn into a world of love and melodrama when he befriends a runaway girl from Mississippi.

Mostel died, and the film was never made, but Allen has dusted off the script and revised it for Larry David, a modern master of a brand of lovable hatefulness not unlike that wielded by the great Zero himself, a paradoxical ability to draw our empathy even while behaving deplorably.

And make no mistake: Boris is deplorable, abusing the children he tutors in chess, cruelly belittling his friends and the women in his life, nourished only by a hollow routine and a diet of gall, spite and rancor. In plotting right out of a screwball comedy, he stumbles one evening upon Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a new-fangled mixed-up Southern belle. Malleable and naïve, she begs a bite to eat and a couch to sleep on, and soon enough she enters and alters Boris's entire life and world. After a time, her mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) joins the scene, and the permutations and metamorphoses expand comically, sensually, charmingly.

The trio of central actors plays beautifully, even if they sometimes butt against material that's been written somewhat programmatically or telegraphically. David is fluent and caustic yet somehow approachable; Wood's ditzy sprite is played with wit and verve; and Clarkson is a ball of drollery and fire, Blanche DuBois channeled through some of the great performances Dianne Wiest gave in Allen's 1980s films.

Craftwise, there are some shocking lapses, as in most of Allen's recent work -- it's as if, like Clint Eastwood, he is working at such a hurried clip to keep making new films that he's willing to let outright gaffes seep into the final product so as not to waste precious time in perfecting everything. That said, Harris Savides' cinematography is moody in an unobtrusive way, the music is, as ever, delightful, and Allen's conceit that Boris is aware that he's being watched by an audience allows for some lovely inventions. The film sometimes wavers between sentiment and acid, wisdom and ickiness, but it does so at an level uncommonly high for commercial American comedy. It might be possible to be put off by some aspects of "Whatever Works," but it never makes you feel like an idiot for watching it -- which is more than you can say for most Hollywood rom-coms.

The knowledge that the film has been, in a sense, resurrected imparts a curious electricity. The update isn't entirely successful and the film has unignorable flaws. But enough of the zest and freshness of the original creation are still evident in "Whatever Works" so that it can stand comfortably alongside other, better Allen films. At one and the same time it feels like a decent-but-not-great film of his '70s period and a perky and tart entry in his modestly successful revival in the last half-decade. Neat trick.